1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to accessing information and, more particularly, to retrieving information from disparate information sources and integrating the retrieved information in a user-defined format.
2. Description of the Related Art
We live in an information age. More information is being created and made available than ever before, due to the development of computers in general and access technologies in particular. For example, the Internet provides an unprecedented amount of information. However, there are problems to be solved. First, the information sought is normally stored in a distributed manner. For example, a single information source may store only a portion of the information sought and therefore other information sources may have to be separately accessed to gather the information sought. Second, even if the information sought is successfully located in one or more information sources, the information may not be readily available to a user for various reasons. For example, the portions of the information stored in different information sources may be in different formats such that the portions are not readily combinable without additional efforts on the part of the user. Third, using a single, centralized integration system to retrieve information from a number of different information sources and integrate the retrieved information may be impractical as the number of the information sources grows. Also, such a centralized integration system requires storing data in a data warehouse first and then fetch the data from the data warehouse, thereby providing possibly outdated data.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for retrieving information directly from disparate information sources without going through a data warehouse and integrating the retrieved information in a user-defined format. There is also a need for a system and method for retrieving and integrating such information in real-time without resorting to a single, centralized integration system.